


A Collection of Prompts

by orphan_account



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Dungeons and Dragons, Gen, M/M, Merman!AU, Merman!Shane, dnd, vampire!AU, vampire!Shane
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-24 13:19:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13811988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Prompts I got on my tumblr that I thought it may be nice to post on here to. Will be added to as I write more.





	1. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

**Author's Note:**

> This was for the prompt ‘39. “You don’t talk much, do you?” ‘, which was sent to me from [this list](https://crunchywrites.tumblr.com/post/171323926961/i-nq-99-prompts-1-you-know-i-knew-wed-end-up). If you see one that you’d like me to write something based on, please send it in! This is also mostly unchecked, so if there's any typos/similar I apologise, and will try to remember to fix it up tomorrow.

The water of the lake is still and silent when Ryan takes his boat out on a cool fall morning. It’s just a little day trip, nothing major, but no one looking at his boat would know that – it’s stocked like he’s preparing to cross the Atlantic, full of cans and tins and Tupperware boxes and several large, pristine sketchbooks that he made sure to safely tuck away in the little cabin before setting out. There’s also a towel, big and fluffy just how Ryan likes them, and all his swimming kit neatly packed away as well – the lake will be chilly, but Ryan’s swum in colder.

And besides, this swim should be worth it.

It only takes half an hour or so for him to drive his boat out most of the way to the little island that juts out the water in the middle of the lake. It’s called the Giant’s Fist, but Ryan’s never agreed with that description of it – to him it looks more like a nose, sticking out of the water like whatever giant there is slumbering in the lake didn’t plan ahead and bring a snorkel, and so instead it had to poke its nose out just above the surface of the water and hope for the best.

The thought makes Ryan smile to himself as he slows the engine and sets about preparing the anchor. He planned ahead. He brought a snorkel.

He drops anchor about thirty yards away from the island, by a small cluster of rocks that actually _are_ unnamed. Ryan doesn’t know what name he’d give them. The Giant’s Stubble, maybe. The Giant’s One Weird Wart.

Or maybe he’ll just keep doing like he’s been doing these last several months, and he’ll keep on calling them The Meeting Place.

Because that’s what it is now.

The sound of the anchor breaking the surface of the water is loud in the still, mist-hung air. Ryan watches the few bubbles it sends up as it sinks into the darkness of the lake, the last shreds of oxygen clinging to its sides finally displaced as it settles on the silty, rocky base of the lake. He can hear the birds that live on The Giant’s Fist singing their whistling songs, can hear the soft _shush-shush_ ing of the willows that dip their fronds into the lake water from the bank. There’s no wind today, but the willows _shush_ him all the same, the leaves twisting and shifting briefly in the ring of ripples that the anchor sent out before those too fade. _Shush, shush, shush_. Ryan doesn’t need the reminder to be quiet. He likes the quiet out here, where it’s just him and his boat and the sky and the water and the mist caressing his face and curling around his wrists like an embrace, like it’s welcoming him back. It crawls underneath the collar of his thick jacket, makes him shiver, but he doesn’t retreat to the warmth and safety of the cabin, doesn’t reach for the thermos of coffee he’s got stowed inside. Not yet.

Ryan breathes in the cool air of the lake, and he waits.

He can be patient for this.

It takes about fifteen minutes for what he’s waiting for to appear; a flash of silver down by the anchor, so quick anyone else would have missed it. There’s a pause, and then it comes again. The sunlight that’s weakly pushing its way through the clouds is barely enough to illuminate the scales, but it’s enough. It’s enough for Ryan. He knows what he’s looking for, and feels a smile start to creep up on his face.

_Flash_. It’s closer now, rising to the surface like the bubbles of the anchor, glimmering and shining like liquid silver, like mercury. The water of the lake is dark, almost impossibly so, and there’s a brief moment where Ryan spies no silver at all before the water churns just by the anchor chain, and a dark-haired head peeks above the surface of the water.

“Hi,” Ryan says, and watches the mostly-submerged merman smile through the murky water.

_Shush,_ say the willows, and Ryan glances in their direction before sitting down on the side of his boat, legs hanging through the railings. The willows will shush themselves in time. The merman creates fewer ripples than the anchor when he breaches, and the trees murmur for a few seconds more before settling into silence again, and then it’s just Ryan’s voice carrying above the water.

“I brought food for you,” he says, gesturing to the small stack of tins and Tupperware he’d lashed down on deck before setting off. “You seemed to really like the popcorn last time, so there’s more of that in the cabin. I didn’t know what flavour to get you though, so I just got you most of them.” The merman smiles, curls his tail around the anchor chain, and lifts himself slightly further out of the water. Ryan can see the gills along the sides of his neck rippling slightly in the water, and is glad that his friend is sensible enough to keep the water level just beneath his nose. He doesn’t want him to drown, or- well, or do whatever the air equivalent of drowning is. Suffocate, he supposes.

Yeah, he doesn’t want that.

He reaches out, and grabs a Tupperware at random. “Today, though,” he says cheerfully, “I thought we could start with- well, okay, admittedly this is just my dinner. My leftovers. I was gonna stick it in the freezer, but, well, y’know-“ He breaks off, lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “-Thought you might like to try it.” He grins, and holds the small container out towards the merman, who reaches one webbed hand out of the water to take it. Ryan watches with amusement as the merman examines it, the same way he does every dish Ryan presents to him: carefully, and with great scrutiny, like he might be examined on it later. He peers at the food through the clear plastic sides of the Tupperware for a few long moments, tilting his head slightly awkwardly as he holds the container just above the water, before carefully grasping the lid between his webbed fingers and pulling it off, handing it back to Ryan once he’s done. Ryan’s glad about that – he’d lost a fair few lids before he’d managed to convince the merman to start giving them back.

He’s pretty sure the merman had let them float off on purpose, the dick. He’d certainly had a shit-eating grin that had implied as much.

Ryan falls silent as the merman starts poking at the food, sniffing it and examining it from every angle before finally reaching in to scoop some of it up with his fingers. Ryan would give him cutlery, but between the webbing on the merman’s fingers and some leftover concerns from seeing Ariel and her fork in _The Little Mermaid_ he’s worried it might be dropped and he might never get it back. And Ryan only has so much cutlery. So for now the merman eats cutlery-free, and he doesn’t seem to mind one bit.

He eats the same way he examines the food, tasting every single morsel slowly and carefully, his dark – and shockingly _human_ – eyes slightly narrowed as he rolls it around his mouth. It’s a slow process, but one that Ryan’s used to by now – he uses the time to quickly excuse himself to the cabin and return a moment later with a thermos and a sketchbook in hand, before settling down where he was sitting previously. He opens the thermos, pours himself a nice cup, and takes a good long sip before picking up a pencil and starting to sketch the pattern of scales that fan out across the mermans face from where his ears would be if they weren’t fins. They’re pretty scales, Ryan thinks absently; they’re a sort of silvery blue-green in colour, much like the leaves of the shushing willows, and faintly iridescent. Even in today’s faint sunlight they shimmer and shift slightly, and though Ryan knows he’ll never be able to capture them exactly on paper he does his best anyway. He’s not going to take a picture of the merman – he’d decided that soon after encountering him for the first time. Somehow, he feels, taking a picture would make it all feel… less.

Less real.

Less _his_.

So he sits and sketches instead, and glances back towards the water and the merman when he hears claws starting to scrape the bottom of the container, and places his sketchbook to one side. He can finish he sketch later.

“So,” he asks, when the merman has finished eating the small portion that Ryan had handed to him and given the Tupperware back. “What did you think? Good?”

The merman pulls a slight face, and makes a so-so motion with one hand. The motion had been one of the first things Ryan had taught him – even though he seems to understand English, and pretty well at that, some of Ryan’s gestures had confused him until he’d explained them. He thinks they have a pretty solid system in place now, but he’d seen _The Shape Of Water_ not too long ago and is beginning to wonder if it might be worth teaching the merman ASL. Because this guy clearly understands language, and names, and he almost certainly has a name of his own, and if Ryan can just give him a system of communication then maybe he can finally, _finally_ , stop calling him ‘the merman’ and call him by his actual name.

One day. Not today.

Because today Ryan doesn’t know any ASL beyond ‘hello’, and also because today’s plan was, and still is, to let the merman sample as much of Ryan’s human food as possible. He places the Tupperware back in the box he’d packed them all in, and withdraws another. “This is stew,” he says, and passes the container down, and the process repeats again. Ryan sketches, glancing up occasionally to see how the merman reacts to whatever he gives him, retrieves and replaces the empty boxes and hands the merman something new. It’s in one of the in-between periods, when the merman has signed in their strange not-language that he’s done for now, that Ryan speaks again.

**“You don’t talk much, do you?”** he asks absently, and looks up from where he’s fiddling with a pencil in his lap.

The merman smirks and shakes his head. _No_ , the action says.

“Why not?”

The merman hoists himself further out of the water, enough that his mouth is exposed to the air, and opens it. What comes out- well, it definitely couldn’t be called _words_ , but it’s definitely a sound with intent, and a painful-sounding one at that. It sounds the same way Ryan did when he caught that cold that made him lose his voice for two weeks, and the combination of the memory and the sound is enough to make him wince in sympathy.

“Fair enough,” he says, and reaches out to push the merman back under the water by the shoulder. “Get your face back under there, dude. Get breathing.” The merman grins a little, safely submerged, and reaches up to flick some droplets of water at Ryan. The accompanying eyeroll is language enough: _I know how not to suffocate myself, thank you very much_. Ryan sticks his tongue out in retaliation, and gets splashed again. “Hey!” Ryan laughs, “Dude, no! I’m in my jeans – these take forever to dry.”

Another eyeroll, and then- well, Ryan’s sure he sees _something_ spark in the merman’s eyes before a webbed hand wraps around his ankle, and starts gently tugging.

“Hey,” Ryan warns, and starts trying to tug his foot back. “I’m- don’t you dare pull me in, I swear to God.” To his surprise, the merman relinquishes easily, and Ryan belatedly realises that he probably wasn’t actually _trying_ to pull Ryan into the water, he was just… doing something else.

Ryan frowns at him. “What do you want?”

The merman lifts a hand, beckons to Ryan, and tugs on his ankle again. Ryan had an inkling of what he wanted before, but the merman’s full intent is completely clear now; _come join me in the water_ , he means to say, and Ryan feels his grin spreading across his face.

Because unlike the gargantuan owner of The Giant’s Fist (or possibly nose), Ryan had been half-expecting, half-hoping for this day for weeks, and is more than prepared for it. “Let go of my ankle,” he says, “And I will be right back, alright? I’m just- I’m not swimming in my jeans and jacket, y’know?” The hand on his ankle releases instantly, and Ryan wastes no time in scurrying to the little cabin and stripping out of his clothes and into his swim trunks and goggles.

The air is bracingly chilly when he steps back on deck, but not _bad_ – it’s definitely bearable, and though he knows the water will be much colder he finds that he doesn’t actually mind the knowledge too much, because the wide grin that the merman is giving him is enough to warm him right down to his bones. He half-jogs, half-walks over to the railing, and contemplates his options for all of two seconds before thinking _fuck it_ , hoisting himself onto the railing, and jumping straight into the water of the lake.

It’s _freezing_.

Well, that’s an exaggeration. It is _extremely cold_ , colder even than Ryan expected, and his teeth are chattering even before his head pops above the surface of the water.

“ _Shit_ ,” he hisses, and lifts a hand to push his now-soaking hair out of his face. _Ugh_. He’ll have to shower later. The lake may be freshwater, but that doesn’t mean it’s _clean_. Ryan doesn’t know how many birds have pooped in it. He doesn’t _want_ to know.

He just wants to know why the merman wanted Ryan to join him in the lake, and it seems Ryan won’t have to wait long to find out, because the thought barely crosses his mind before the merman is unwrapping himself from the anchor chain and swimming across the Ryan in a few sinuous movements of his tail. The merman reaches out, and his skin is colder than Ryan expected when his hand wraps around Ryan’s wrist. He tugs again, still lightly, and points down, before holding the thumb and index finger of his hand an inch or so apart. Ryan understand. _Come underwater, but just a little bit_.

“I can only be down there for so long,” Ryan warns, and the merman nods. _I know_.

“Alright,” Ryan says, and takes a huge breath before ducking his head under the water and doing his best to push himself a few feet down.

The lake is just as dark under the water as it looked from above, but thankfully all that Ryan has to look at is right in front of him. The mermaid is somehow even more stunning when seen beneath the water – Ryan already knew the merman was strikingly handsome to begin with, but beneath the water he looks… _more_ than that. With the scales shimmering on his face and across his shoulders and chest he looks like something fey and alien, like something born of the lake and the birds and the whispering, shushing willows. He looks like he belongs here, coiled and sinuous with his pale pearlescent white-green-blue tail shifting lazily beneath him, and Ryan is only able to pull his attention away from the shifting, shimmering light that glances off the merman’s scales when his wrist is tugged on again. He looks up, lungs still comfortably full of oxygen, and the merman smiles at him, small and soft and happy.

“Hi,” the merman says, and Ryan watches as half his breath leaves him in shining silver bubbles the same colour as the merman’s scales. “I’m Shane.”


	2. "Tell Me Again"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the sentence prompt "Tell me again"

**“Tell me again.”**

“You fail the saving throw.”

“… _Again_.”

“You fail the saving throw, Ryan.”

Ryan glares at him. “Need I remind you, Shane, that I am  _your_ boyfriend, and you are in  _my_ apartment?”

Shane shrugs, and grins widely. “Hey, I’m your DM, baby! My world, my rules!”

“This is ridiculous. I got a natural 18!”

“Yeah,” Shane replies, “With a  _minus two_ modifier.”

“That’s still a 16.”

“And the DC is 17. You’re level 8 now, Ryan. DCs are gonna be tougher.”

“Yeah, but this is-“

“If you say ‘this is ridiculous’ one more time I  _will_ have Tiamat herself swoop down from the heavens and carry you off to some awful hell dimension.”

“…You wouldn’t dare.”

Shane quirks an eyebrow, and lifts a d20 from behind his Dungeon Master’s screen. “You wanna test that, little guy?”

Ryan crosses his arms across his chest, and glares daggers at Shane. “I hate you so much right now. If I die-“

“-If  _D.B.Cooper,_ hafling barbarian dies-“

“…Fuck you, Shane. If  _D.B_ dies I will  _personally_ shove all of these dice down your throat until you choke on them, and then laugh over your corpse.”

Shane grins. “Kinky.”

Across the table from Ryan, Steven turns and presses his face against Andrew’s neck. “Every session,” he whispers, and Andrew lifts a hand to gently run it through his hair.

“Every session,” he agrees.


	3. "I'm only here to establish an alibi."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the sentence prompt "I'm only here to establish an alibi."

“ **I’m only here to establish an alibi** ,” Shane says the second Ryan opens the door, and Ryan has to take a few moments to blink in surprise before he manages to force his body to actually step aside and let Shane into his apartment.

“An alibi for what?” he asks, lifting a hand to rub at his eyes as he pushes the door shut behind Shane. It’s- Christ, it must be three in the morning, or thereabouts, and he has  _no idea_ what the fuck is happening. “For who?”

“For  _me_ , obviously,” Shane says. He’s already making his way towards the couch, and as Ryan watches from his position by the door he flops down into it, kicking his feet up to rest them on the coffee table, and it’s like the spirit of Ryan’s (still very much alive) mother takes over because he’s standing by the couch in a heartbeat, hands batting at Shane’s shoes.

“Hey,” he says, and then bats harder when Shane doesn’t seem to get the idea, “ _Hey_. Shoes off the table, dude. Christ, were you raised in a barn?”

Shane doesn’t say anything to that – he just grins, and moves his feet off the table, and it’s only once his shoes are safely on the ground that Ryan finally sits down on the couch next to him.

“What do you need an alibi for, anyway?”

“ _Well_ ,” Shane beings, and Ryan instantly leans back and groans, because the tone of that one word is so fucking familiar that he almost feels that this should be a goddamn dream.

 _Dating Shane_ , he thinks,  _was a fucking awful idea_.

“…You didn’t,” he says, and turns his head to look at his boyfriend.

Shane says nothing, but his face gives him away – he’s wearing what is very possibly the  _guiltiest,_ most sheepish looking expression that Ryan has ever seen on him.

Ryan groans. “ _Shane_! Again? Seriously?”

“What?”

“I can’t keep covering for you, dude! You’re gonna get caught.”

Shane scoffs. “I am  _not_. No one even believes I exist, for starters.”

“They will if they keep finding corpses like they are.”

“They just think it’s the work of some, like, uber-creepy serial killer!”

“Yeah, which is basically  _exactly what you are_.”

Shane gasps, and lifts a hand to press it against his heart.

“I am  _wounded_ ,” he says. “I am  _offended_. Ryan, babe, I can’t believe you think that about me. You’re just as bad as the cops.”

“What, for calling my boyfriend out on his bullshit?”

“For  _siding with the enemy_ ,” Shane hisses back in response, but he can’t mask the grin that’s now creeping onto his face.

Ryan rolls his eyes. “Look,” he says, “I don’t care that you’re- y’know, what you are. That’s cool.”

“You cared when you first found out.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s because up until like four months ago I didn’t think that vampires were actually  _real_.”

“Which is,” Shane begins, and has to pause as Ryan sighs and groans.  _God_. He knows exactly what Shane’s about to say. “ _Which is_ ,” Shane continues, “Ridiculous. I can’t believe you believed in ghosts but not in vampires.”

“There’s no evidence for vampires.”

“You are  _dating one_.”

“Yeah, and I am  _well aware_ of that fact!” Ryan sighs again, and turns slightly on the couch, reaching out to take one of Shane’s hands in his own. “Shane,” he says, “I really don’t want you to get caught, alright. And yeah, I know that you could bust yourself out of jail in a couple of minutes, but don’t want to date an actual fugitive. If you really need a drink just come find me. I don’t care.”

Shane’s face, which had become unusually sombre through the duration of Ryan’s small speech, twists a little. “But-“

“But  _what_? I give blood regularly. This is pretty much the same thing.”

“I could kill you.”

Ryan shrugs. He’s tired, and it’s late, and they have been over this so many times already. “And I could kill you too. I’ve got a stake and garlic and-“

“The garlic thing is bullshit. I love garlic bread.”

“I  _know,_  Shane. You know what I mean. You could kill me from drinking my blood and I could kill you with a particularly good stab. Just fucking accept it, dude. If you really need blood, come find me.”

Shane’s fingers flex in Ryan’s hand, just once.

“…You’re sure?” he asks, after a long silence, and Ryan smiles, and nods, and leans in to press a little kiss to Shane’s cheek.

“I’m sure,” he replies.

“…Alright.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“D’you- do you need to…?”

Shane shakes his head. “No,” he says, “I’m good, I-“

“Oh, yeah.” Ryan nods. “The alibi.”

Shane shifts a little, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah,” he agrees. “The alibi.”

There’s another slightly awkward pause.

“Now,” Ryan says, “This alibi of yours… did you have a plan for it?”

“Oh,” Shane replies, and smirks a little, “I had some ideas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! If you have any prompts or requests for me please feel free to drop by my [tumblr!](https://crunchywrites.tumblr.com/)


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